CAIRO: In a bid to accelerate the handing over of power to civilians, a delegation of activists met with the People's Assembly on Monday to discuss the various initiatives, among them a proposition to appoint the PA speaker as an interim president until elections occurred. “We're a group of public figures which have decided, in light of the failure of [the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces] to handle the transition, to adopt an initiative that was presented before the sole elected authority,” said Wael Kandil, delegation member and managing editor of Al-Shorouk Newspaper. Following a heated discussion in the PA in which some MPs said demonstrators outside the nearby Ministry of Interior should be labelled as “thugs,” the delegation held a press conference Monday evenings to discuss their meetings with the parliament. Kandil explained that the initiative was a set of suggestions and solutions aiming at the immediate removal of SCAF from the political scene. The delegation, he added, spent over four hours discussing the matter with PA deputy Ashraf Thabet along with others from the defense and national security committee. In addition to the delegation of presidential authority — currently allocated to SCAF — to the PA Speaker, the initiative proposes forming a provisional government commissioned to oversee the legislative reforms necessary for, and the carrying out of, presidential elections as soon as is possible. The exact formation of the provisional government wasn't stipulated in the proposition, which left it open to be reflective of the parliamentary majority or a coalition government, as long as it had full authority to perform the necessary duties. It also stipulated that the mandate for the provisional government to elapse “as soon as the constitutional institutions of the state were elected,” and that among the few tasks it would be assigned to tackle is the amendment of article 28 of the constitutional declaration adopted by SCAF in March 2011. Article 28 is mainly concerned with the presidential elections committee, which is headed by the chief of the supreme court, and whose decisions are effectively final and cannot be appealed, “by any means or by any side.” The initiative also called the purification and restructuring of state institutions — such as the official state media and the interior ministry — and the prosecution of the former regime figures. Under the latter chapter, it requested the removal of the prosecutor general and appointment of another out of the ranks of the movement for judiciary independence, the formation of a commission to investigate regime crimes, and the establishment of ‘revolutionary criminal courts.' Kandil said that the delegation also met with PA Speaker Saad El-Katatny, who promised the issue would be discussed by the responsible committees within the assembly. The members of the group didn't indicate that their initiative was changed following Monday's PA session, which they were critical of, especially regarding calls by some MPs to sanction the killing of protesters. Karima El-Hefnawy, another delegate and member of the National Association for Change, said that the MPs, among whom several were hostile, never gave the delegation a chance to speak. “We found out that some MPs were frustrated with the session,” she said, “while others were accusing the protesters of conspiracy.” She said that the elected PA had to be responsible for the sake of the people who had elected them. “If you're going to speak in names of freedom and justice and accept deals with SCAF, no one will ever agree.” She criticized the PA for being too slow in making decisions while a massacre was occurring just outside. “They had to withdraw confidence [from government].” The initiative includes several activists, journalists, lawyers and politicians including novelist Alaa Al-Aswany, lawyers Ragia Omran and Ahmed Ragheb, Mohamed Tolba of the Salafiyo Costa group, activists Israa Abdel-Fattah and Alaa Abdel-Fattah, TV host Youssef El-Husseini and Ali Hassan, father of martyr Mohab Ali Hassan.
